July 04, 2008

Whose Fanwank is it Anyway?

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth

There's not much left to say about The Stolen Earth
that my estimable
colleagues on this blog haven't already said, but something Neil
mentioned in his fabulous, nail-on-the-head review
got me
thinking about fanwank so I thought I'd make a few generalisations and see where it takes me. There were loads of references to the
"classic" series in The Stolen Earth and previous episodes, but there
were also many more references to stuff that has its origins in the new
series. The Shadow Proclamation goes right back to Rose, the Medusa
Cascade was mentioned at the end of series 3, and there are many other
examples since the series came back, not least of which all those
shennanigans about the Face of Boe. Fanwank has been defined in lots
of ways but this one is as good as any other: "A term used in Doctor
Who fiction to refer to any piece of work which
reuses old monsters or characters purely in an attempt to stir feelings
in the groins of sad anal fanboys." I think that
you could also refine it slightly by saying that it's also any piece of
work "which references old monsters or characters purely in an attempt
to stir feelings in the groins of sad anal fanboys". What's
interesting about the definition is that it's all about the target -
fanwank gets the sad fanboys going - and this is what seems to drive a
lot of the hostility towards those Doctor Who episodes which they
perceive to be loaded with stuff that supposedly leaves the general audience
bewildered.

Too much fanwank

I was particularly struck by this hostility when I read a comment on
another forum from someone who's a fairly high-profile fan but
decidedly keen on distancing himself from the sadder fanboy types.
He'd watched Turn Left and decided that "the Fanwank
God had been out fanwanked by RTD", the episode had been a "Doctor Who
fan's wet dream" and he could "imagine them bouncing up and down with
excitement as each new companion death was casually announced via
background news reports". This made me laugh at first, but then I
started wondering who exactly these Doctor Who fans were supposed to
be, especially as the bulk of Turn Left was about revisiting moments
from the series since RTD came on the scene. There's a weird consensus
in some circles that the only people who could possibly enjoy things
like the detail of those background news reports are the old-style weak
lemon drink type of fans who make transcripts of each programme while
chuckling into their handwritten Big Finish synopses. This is, of
course, nonsense, and the notion only exists because the people who
perpetuate it are themselves bound up in another, less-celebrated part
of the old-school fan mindset: fear of continuity. It's a given among
some fans that the classic series withered away because it became
increasingly inward looking and incomprehensible to the general viewer
because of the obsession with continuity during the John Nathan-Turner
era. The argument is OK as far as it goes, but tends to ignore other
crucial problems such as wayward producing, disastrous casting and
frequent recourse to the "Will this do?" school of script-writing. But
the spectre remains at the feast. It takes only a small reference to
the past in current Who to start the siren voices plangently crying
"Too much fanwank - it'll lose the public - playing to the fans."

Surely something as niche a
concept as fanwank loses all meaning if it's applied to something that appeals to
a mainstream channel's popular audience?

The absurdity of this position really came to the fore when Doomsday
was transmitted. The battle of the Daleks and Cybermen was
characterised by some as pure fanwank, something that even fan fiction
writers would have thought twice about. But this fanwank episode was
watched by over 8 million ecstatic viewers, only the merest fraction of
whom could be described as fanboys. Surely something as niche a
concept as fanwank loses all meaning if it's applied to something that appeals to
a mainstream channel's popular audience? Forget the weak lemon drink
fans watching Turn Left - all 0.5% of them - and remember that a huge
swathe of the audience enjoying the references to Matha and Sarah's
deaths and the rewriting of earlier events are young males and females
(yes females) who have been happily watching the series since 2005.
They are not like the old fans in the 1980s who staunchly gathered
around a minority interest show and who relished the supposed cut and
thrust of continuity madness. They are in a world where the national
press features lengthy articles about Bad Wolf and Saxon. They are in
a world where series arcs and motifs don't alienate anyone. The
average "I'm better than fanwank" fan is the one who says, seemingly
every week, that episode x featured "too many references to something
that happened earlier in the series - the audience won't understand
it", and retains this view undaunted by all the other evidence
(ratings, AIs, word-of-mouth) which suggests that not only are the
audience not alienated, they are lapping it up and screaming for more.

for Doctor Who fans
to worry that some footling story arcs are the harbingers of doom is
the highest form of 1980s paranoid nonsense

I sometimes wonder if these loons actually understand
that television is a bit different nowadays from when Colin Baker was
strutting his stuff. I have some sympathy for the view that Doctor Who
gets a bit bogged down with its series arcs, but that isn't same as
saying that the general public have problems with them. The programme
is mild in comparison to US shows that are increasingly adopting the
true serial form. Network television channels with large audiences are
showing Lost, Heroes, Prison Breakout and so on, but I don't hear
people having paroxysms whenever a character from Series 1 of Lost
suddenly reappears in the series 3 finale. The world didn't end when
Buffy showed up in Angel. I didn't feel moved to shout "the audience
will be confused" when a minor first series plot point became
significant in the final series of The Wire. Television is at its best
when it can exploit a long and complex developing narrative, and this
pattern is increasingly supported by the development of iPlayers,
downloadable episodes and DVD season boxsets. So for Doctor Who fans
to worry that some footling story arcs are the harbingers of doom is
the highest form of 1980s paranoid nonsense.

The
current Doctor Who viewers are the fanwank obsessed
fans.

The Stolen Earth has been slagged off in various places on the web as
being a confusing and frantic mish-mash of elements from the Davies
era, and on more than one occasion as having appeal only to fanwank
obsessed fans. I find this view depressing and wrong-headed. The
current Doctor Who viewers are the fanwank obsessed
fans. That's the point. They like fanwank. For fanwank and continuity, read "modern
television storytelling". In this case sometimes ropey modern television storytelling. OK - there were quite a few nods to classic
era Who, but they had no impact on the story and were just a nice bit
of window dressing for the main event which was to give the general
audience the culmination of a story that began with Rose. Imagine the
eight-year old boy or girl who started watching the series in 2005.
The Stolen Earth must have been like all their Christmases at once, and
who would begrudge them that just because a few of the weak lemon
drinkers liked it as well?

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Whose Fanwank is it Anyway?

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth

There's not much left to say about The Stolen Earth
that my estimable
colleagues on this blog haven't already said, but something Neil
mentioned in his fabulous, nail-on-the-head review
got me
thinking about fanwank so I thought I'd make a few generalisations and see where it takes me. There were loads of references to the
"classic" series in The Stolen Earth and previous episodes, but there
were also many more references to stuff that has its origins in the new
series. The Shadow Proclamation goes right back to Rose, the Medusa
Cascade was mentioned at the end of series 3, and there are many other
examples since the series came back, not least of which all those
shennanigans about the Face of Boe. Fanwank has been defined in lots
of ways but this one is as good as any other: "A term used in Doctor
Who fiction to refer to any piece of work which
reuses old monsters or characters purely in an attempt to stir feelings
in the groins of sad anal fanboys." I think that
you could also refine it slightly by saying that it's also any piece of
work "which references old monsters or characters purely in an attempt
to stir feelings in the groins of sad anal fanboys". What's
interesting about the definition is that it's all about the target -
fanwank gets the sad fanboys going - and this is what seems to drive a
lot of the hostility towards those Doctor Who episodes which they
perceive to be loaded with stuff that supposedly leaves the general audience
bewildered.

Too much fanwank

I was particularly struck by this hostility when I read a comment on
another forum from someone who's a fairly high-profile fan but
decidedly keen on distancing himself from the sadder fanboy types.
He'd watched Turn Left and decided that "the Fanwank
God had been out fanwanked by RTD", the episode had been a "Doctor Who
fan's wet dream" and he could "imagine them bouncing up and down with
excitement as each new companion death was casually announced via
background news reports". This made me laugh at first, but then I
started wondering who exactly these Doctor Who fans were supposed to
be, especially as the bulk of Turn Left was about revisiting moments
from the series since RTD came on the scene. There's a weird consensus
in some circles that the only people who could possibly enjoy things
like the detail of those background news reports are the old-style weak
lemon drink type of fans who make transcripts of each programme while
chuckling into their handwritten Big Finish synopses. This is, of
course, nonsense, and the notion only exists because the people who
perpetuate it are themselves bound up in another, less-celebrated part
of the old-school fan mindset: fear of continuity. It's a given among
some fans that the classic series withered away because it became
increasingly inward looking and incomprehensible to the general viewer
because of the obsession with continuity during the John Nathan-Turner
era. The argument is OK as far as it goes, but tends to ignore other
crucial problems such as wayward producing, disastrous casting and
frequent recourse to the "Will this do?" school of script-writing. But
the spectre remains at the feast. It takes only a small reference to
the past in current Who to start the siren voices plangently crying
"Too much fanwank - it'll lose the public - playing to the fans."

Surely something as niche a
concept as fanwank loses all meaning if it's applied to something that appeals to
a mainstream channel's popular audience?

The absurdity of this position really came to the fore when Doomsday
was transmitted. The battle of the Daleks and Cybermen was
characterised by some as pure fanwank, something that even fan fiction
writers would have thought twice about. But this fanwank episode was
watched by over 8 million ecstatic viewers, only the merest fraction of
whom could be described as fanboys. Surely something as niche a
concept as fanwank loses all meaning if it's applied to something that appeals to
a mainstream channel's popular audience? Forget the weak lemon drink
fans watching Turn Left - all 0.5% of them - and remember that a huge
swathe of the audience enjoying the references to Matha and Sarah's
deaths and the rewriting of earlier events are young males and females
(yes females) who have been happily watching the series since 2005.
They are not like the old fans in the 1980s who staunchly gathered
around a minority interest show and who relished the supposed cut and
thrust of continuity madness. They are in a world where the national
press features lengthy articles about Bad Wolf and Saxon. They are in
a world where series arcs and motifs don't alienate anyone. The
average "I'm better than fanwank" fan is the one who says, seemingly
every week, that episode x featured "too many references to something
that happened earlier in the series - the audience won't understand
it", and retains this view undaunted by all the other evidence
(ratings, AIs, word-of-mouth) which suggests that not only are the
audience not alienated, they are lapping it up and screaming for more.

for Doctor Who fans
to worry that some footling story arcs are the harbingers of doom is
the highest form of 1980s paranoid nonsense

I sometimes wonder if these loons actually understand
that television is a bit different nowadays from when Colin Baker was
strutting his stuff. I have some sympathy for the view that Doctor Who
gets a bit bogged down with its series arcs, but that isn't same as
saying that the general public have problems with them. The programme
is mild in comparison to US shows that are increasingly adopting the
true serial form. Network television channels with large audiences are
showing Lost, Heroes, Prison Breakout and so on, but I don't hear
people having paroxysms whenever a character from Series 1 of Lost
suddenly reappears in the series 3 finale. The world didn't end when
Buffy showed up in Angel. I didn't feel moved to shout "the audience
will be confused" when a minor first series plot point became
significant in the final series of The Wire. Television is at its best
when it can exploit a long and complex developing narrative, and this
pattern is increasingly supported by the development of iPlayers,
downloadable episodes and DVD season boxsets. So for Doctor Who fans
to worry that some footling story arcs are the harbingers of doom is
the highest form of 1980s paranoid nonsense.

The
current Doctor Who viewers are the fanwank obsessed
fans.

The Stolen Earth has been slagged off in various places on the web as
being a confusing and frantic mish-mash of elements from the Davies
era, and on more than one occasion as having appeal only to fanwank
obsessed fans. I find this view depressing and wrong-headed. The
current Doctor Who viewers are the fanwank obsessed
fans. That's the point. They like fanwank. For fanwank and continuity, read "modern
television storytelling". In this case sometimes ropey modern television storytelling. OK - there were quite a few nods to classic
era Who, but they had no impact on the story and were just a nice bit
of window dressing for the main event which was to give the general
audience the culmination of a story that began with Rose. Imagine the
eight-year old boy or girl who started watching the series in 2005.
The Stolen Earth must have been like all their Christmases at once, and
who would begrudge them that just because a few of the weak lemon
drinkers liked it as well?